Related papers: The role of unobservable characteristics in friend…
Can proximity make friendships more diverse? To address this question, we propose a learning-driven friendship formation model to study how proximity and similarity influence the likelihood of forming social connections. The model predicts…
More than any other species, humans form social ties to individuals who are neither kin nor mates, and these ties tend to be with similar people. Here, we show that this similarity extends to genotypes. Across the whole genome, friends'…
Homophily, the tendency of individuals who are alike to form ties with one another, is an important concept in the study of social networks. Yet accounting for homophily effects is complicated in the context of bipartite networks where ties…
Homophily -- the tendency of individuals to interact with similar others -- shapes how networks form and function. Yet existing approaches typically collapse homophily to a single scale, either one parameter for the whole network or one per…
It is known that individuals in social networks tend to exhibit homophily (a.k.a. assortative mixing) in their social ties, which implies that they prefer bonding with others of their own kind. But what are the reasons for this phenomenon?…
Researchers have focused on understanding how individual's behavior is influenced by the behaviors of their peers in observational studies of social networks. Identifying and estimating causal peer influence, however, is challenging due to…
Homophily and social influence are the fundamental mechanisms that drive the evolution of attitudes, beliefs and behaviour within social groups. Homophily relates the similarity between pairs of individuals' attitudinal states to their…
This article investigates the impact of user homophily on the social process of information diffusion in online social media. Over several decades, social scientists have been interested in the idea that similarity breeds connection:…
Social influence cannot be identified from purely observational data on social networks, because such influence is generically confounded with latent homophily, i.e., with a node's network partners being informative about the node's…
Social networks exhibit strikingly systematic patterns across a wide range of human contexts. While genetic variation accounts for a significant portion of the variation in many complex social behaviors, the heritability of egocentric…
The friendship paradox is a sociological phenomenon stating that most people have fewer friends than their friends do. The generalized friendship paradox refers to the same observation for attributes other than degree, and it has been…
People learn about opportunities and actions by observing the experiences of their friends. We model how homophily -- the tendency to associate with similar others -- affects both the endogenous quality and diversity of the information…
The personal network of relationships is structured in circles of friendships, that go from the most intense relationships to the least intense ones. While this is a well established result, little is known about the stability of those…
The friendship paradox refers to the sociological observation that, while the people's assessment of their own popularity is typically self-aggrandizing, in reality they are less popular than their friends. The generalized friendship…
Identifying the factors that influence academic performance is an essential part of educational research. Previous studies have documented the importance of personality traits, class attendance, and social network structure. Because most of…
Social networks tend to disproportionally favor connections between individuals with either similar or dissimilar characteristics. This propensity, referred to as assortative mixing or homophily, is expressed as the correlation between…
We consider a dynamic network of individuals that may hold one of two different opinions in a two-party society. As a dynamical model, agents can endlessly create and delete links to satisfy a preferred degree, and the network is shaped by…
We study the social structure of Facebook "friendship" networks at one hundred American colleges and universities at a single point in time, and we examine the roles of user attributes - gender, class year, major, high school, and residence…
Contact networks are heterogeneous. People with similar characteristics are more likely to interact, a phenomenon called assortative mixing or homophily. While age-assortativity is well-established and social contact matrices for…
We introduce a model for the formation of social networks, which takes into account the homophily or the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others, and the mechanisms of global and local attachment as well as tie…